Recently there have been a great many lovely things that find their way to me. They’re mostly inexpensive: a beautiful old radio that I’m using as a hall table that was $10, for example, or a gorgeous dress at Filene’s last night for $39.99. But the things that have me most excited, most filled with possibility and life, are green and have all been free.
Sometime in midwinter, I became obsessed with plants. Something about the lack of sun combined electrically with the fact that everything outside was dead, and suddenly all I could do was plan for all the succulents and mother in law’s tongue and dwarf citrus I was going to bring into my house and harbor like a station on the plant Underground Railroad (fleeing the whips and barbs of the winter at the gates). I made grand plans to buy all these things, but had no money… so I dreamed, and waited. I bought planters: some at IKEA when I was in DC, another beautiful milk glass one from Boomerangs last weekend – and suddenly the plants have started to arrive in droves.
It started at work. I adopted a six foot tall cactus that was clearly dying, and then found out that it was older than I was, with a history of well over thirty years at the Institute. I became terror stricken. What if I killed it? Thirty years of work that people had done, wasted. It would be like killing a middle-aged researcher (and almost certainly not as richly deserved). I brought it to my desk while I hemmed and hawed, and named it Oscar.
Due to my desk’s placement under a glass ceiling (the irony is painful), Oscar was soon joined by a refugee from my coworker Jon’s house. Vera the Punk Rock Aloe is a spiky behemoth who must, with her pot and soil and etc, weigh at least fifty pounds. It takes a dolly to move her around; her growth at Jon’s place was curtailed sharply – by the radiator. So while she convalesces from her burn wounds, she hangs out with me instead, in what I like to think of as Succulent Rehab, or even sometimes the O. K. Corral.
Then my coworker Maria brought down a tree, a large shrub and two snake plants from the office of a researcher who left his tenured position at MIT to move to Seattle; no one knows why. He left so fast that he didn’t bother to list his condo until he was already in the process of moving, so the plants in his office were probably last on his list; I’m glad Maria saved them. The two snake plants are bursting out of their pots, so she will be replanting them tomorrow – and I will be able to take one of the propagations home with me.
And today at the therapist's, I looked down and noticed a branch from the jade plant lying on the ground. The bottom part with the two fatter leaves was dead; presumably it’d been there for a while. But the top few leaves were healthy and alive, so I picked it up and brought it home, cut the tip with a sharp knife, and now it is reposing in the warm, dry area of my pantry. Chocolate bars are consistently a little gooey if I put them there, so I assumed it was a cozy enough spot to happily form a callous before trying the arduous work of rooting.
I don’t know what all of this means. Maybe I’m paying more attention, empowering myself to learn more, so I catch these things and take action instead of letting the opportunities pass me by. Maybe I believe I can nurture things where before I lacked that understanding, or maybe the space I created and held to care for another living thing is simply attracting life to itself, to be filled. But I am full of tiny surprises, my eyes and hands. I like to walk home now in this first sharp bite of spring; I see bulb plants like tulips and daffodils springing up everywhere, in their first blushes (mostly purple) of awakening. I’m almost afraid to go away on vacation right now; I will miss these tiny breaths of tenderness. These weeks are our reward for all of winter’s hardships.
For things found and lost, I hope to be astonished. In my head walking home today, Beck hauntingly, wakingly, sleepily, with a touch of sadness, sang to me that true love would find me in the end. I believe that – but I’m also pretty certain that when it does, it won’t mean quite what I think it means now.
I have been anxious lately, and hard on myself. Stressed that I wasn’t writing, scared that I was wasting any potential I may have. I’d planned treatises on Obama as a role model for the simultaneous promotion of mental, physical and emotional health, and another one on the end of winter and the certainty that my heart and I were moving forward, spinning in our orbit and in time, pressing inexorably on around the sun.
I read a book by Andrew Sean Greer called The Path of Minor Planets, and for the weeks I was reading it, my mind sparkled with the theory and metaphor involved. I thought in comets; I had reached my own perihelion. I felt myself returning. But his prose is the stuff of legend; I will dream about this book for years. The more I thought about my own paltry response, the more I was afraid of mediocrity, and ultimately I didn’t write at all. I failed to capture it; the feeling passed.
I worry all the time that I am not a genius. And I punish myself with my own disapproval when I am not good enough for me, which happens much more often than I would like. Perhaps some of the hardest work of all will be to learn how to distinguish between what I would like to be perfect and what I feel to be absolute necessity. I need to write. I love to write. I want to want to write, and not to dam things up, and to accept the frequent average when it comes in a torrent that may also yield something approaching perfection, at least in my own eyes.
To be fairest, clearest: I love to write when I find a clear and curving path to say whatever it was I felt I needed to say. I am rusty now, and tired. It’s hard to put things together in a way I would like if it isn’t science writing. Prose may not come as easily – certainly not if I don’t try. But I am writing. I am talking. I am trying, pulling myself out of the cold and darkness, slowly out of the ground, and into light.
3.18.2009
2.01.2009
big black hole and the little baby star
Sometimes when I read, the movement of my thoughts inside my head crests and rises until it becomes impossible to ignore. It feels, frequently, like a dark sea, full of secrets and stirring currents that are so hidden it would take me years to understand them. Occasionally some of these currents come to the surface with more force than others, winding and spinning, arching their spines, sinking and rising, spooling out into the blackness and pulling me to follow the ineffable paths they’ve left behind. These become the ones I am compelled to scrawl onto the page.
I am reading Sue Monk Kidd’s The Mermaid Chair. The book is an exercise in indulgence for me in so many ways – not the least being the fact that it is nearly a week late. I was at the library on Thursday, too, but I stubbornly held onto this one book, knowing in my bones that while I clearly had felt no overwhelming compulsion to get to it in a timely fashion during its loan period or any of the three subsequent renewals, the new urgency involved in it meant that I would read the book or be tormented now.
The book takes place on a coastal island in South Carolina, bringing my passionate longings for the Gulf Coast to a crashing head. It is more than simply being sick of winter, although I feel that too. It steers clear of the usual touristy descriptions of sand and surf, bright clear water and emptiness. Instead it glorifies itself in the muck: the stink of the ocean at low tide, the creatures and plants and bewildering natives who make their place by sticking to these enclaves of open water and submerged secrets like burrs. We are not the spring break dilettantes. We make our lives in marshes; we survive.
My time in Sarasota was some of the most elegant and confused that I have spent anywhere so far upon this earth. I was born there, then taken away a year into my life. When I moved back for college, I never expected to feel the kind of communion with the land that sea turtles feel on their return to their consecrated corners of the sea. I never expected that leaving would be the wrench it was. I knew simply that I would miss it, knew I would miss its sweet downtown and glowing sunsets and unapologetically sleepy sense of life.
It is a town that feels endlessly like waking up. While that time while you are still in bed is technically not producing anything of value, you still have one foot in dreams even as you turn to greet the day. Great trees rise up out of nothing; colorful characters ride by on the air. There is a very great sense of possibility that is borne, on some level, of the fact that there is nothing you could do today that has yet been ruled out.
Boston, on the other hand, feels proscribed. There are things you do here, and things you don’t. I am new here, so it’s possible I’ve misunderestimated this city, pigeonholed it as a kind of status symbol that powerful people pass through on the way to somewhere else and proper people stay in, comfortable in the knowledge that here is a place where you always know what you should do – and so does everyone else.
I knew I would have to leave Sarasota, knew that since I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life or how I was going to get to Italy, I could easily end up staying in town in unpleasant living situations, working a job I didn’t like, and cradled, but possibly smothered, by the place of my birth. I didn’t think I would be able to grow there into the person I needed to become.
What I am learning now is that I might have been able to, but the rate would have been slow, and it would only have happened if I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone was so large, however, that this would have been nearly impossible for me. And what motivation would I have had? Surrounded by friends, a sense of place and belonging, snug in the bosom of birthright and the sea.
I might have come to myself in a different way, a slower way. But it might have been worth it just to understand in my bones that I could do everything I needed to do without always having to remove myself from something that I loved, that productive life is possible even without the constant companionship of a fundamental, aching sense of longing.
The Mermaid Chair is a love story. While reading it I have been lying on the couch listening to Pandora, my favored station: ladyface radio. Ladyface is a snapshot of whatever is in my heart at a given time, and in an effort to keep it as accurate a mirror image as possible, I relentlessly cull and shelve songs, as well as racking my brain to think of what I’m yearning for that’s missing and adding it whenever I can. Right now it is a fabulous mishmash of indie folk, bhangra, klezmer music, old standards (Dean Martin and Sarah Vaughan featuring heavily), assorted Northern European ambient house, sweet electronic blips and bloops, and anything else that strikes my fancy.
The re-imagined tango is a relatively recent addition, and the moody, forceful, and above all restless strummings of Pavlo and Michael Richards are what shot me bolt upright to scrawl this out now. I have been sipping ice water and semi-sweet rosé from stemless wine glasses. Every time one or the other of them rises, full of delayed purpose, to meet my lips at last, I feel in their cool lapping a sadness that is endless, the itching ache of a nameless, faceless lack.
Today I received an email from a man with whom I could have built a future. I would have liked that, very much – so much that I was able to suspend my disbelief that I could care for anyone, that anyone could care for me. I was open and honest and tender to a degree that I would have found terrifying had it happened at any other time and with any other phantom from my past. And it could just be that this man was my penance for the sin of low self-esteem, because his inability to believe in what we could have built began to poison the new well of us, the one for which we had both been dowsing for so long.
Where we had once lain comfortably within each other’s arms, he began at once to cling to and retreat from me. Impassioned pleas for a partner he could trust never to hurt him again blurred into petty sniping at perceived slights and a frat boy’s cavalier, retroactive undervaluing of our intimacy – it made me feel like a whore, or worse. And yet every time I’ve thought his clear lack of sustainable interest – to say nothing of my lack of patience at the way we seem to dance around the edge of things but never dive in – have precluded a relationship, he gets back in touch with me again.
It is one of my dubious talents that I can create complexity where there is none. But as I learn to accept and embrace all my feelings, my fears and anger and desires, happiness and sadness and longing and even all my shame, things have become increasingly simple to me. One thing shines like a beacon: I am less and less able to accept people who are too tightly closed to celebrate themselves. He is someone who has always had the sense that he has a league and I am somehow out of it, and nothing I have been able to do or say has changed that fundamental insecurity that lies between us, pinioning his arms.
I have learned only recently to let my heart exist on my sleeve. It’s healthier out there, no longer caged. It is learning to respire. And one of the things I have learned in tandem is that the way to make it entirely safe and flourishing out there is to remove not only my heart, but myself, from those who might break it with their mysterious flailings. (Trying to remove one but without the other – what a perplexing and impossibly incomplete schism! Finally, finally, we are learning that we go always together.) There is a quality of innocence and wonder that I hold inside, deep, and the rest of me fights with bearlike strength at times to keep it safe. That is my spark, my little pilot light – it has been through too much to go out now on the backs of flawed relationships and the indignity of biting my tongue to keep from saying what I mean.
I am lying here in a winter that is far from the one of my discontent. It will be over soon, and rather than becoming divorced from my own happiness, I am moving closer and closer to being able to own it, to find it, to speak its own name. When I do, I think I’ll understand that large, important parts of it have been with me all this time. Today has been a day filled with lucid, floating dreams of the sweet bays and slanting sunlight of the place that gave me life and knowledge of a vast, unbroken love for me that is waiting to be claimed. I know what I am headed for. How could I pull over now for anything less?
I am reading Sue Monk Kidd’s The Mermaid Chair. The book is an exercise in indulgence for me in so many ways – not the least being the fact that it is nearly a week late. I was at the library on Thursday, too, but I stubbornly held onto this one book, knowing in my bones that while I clearly had felt no overwhelming compulsion to get to it in a timely fashion during its loan period or any of the three subsequent renewals, the new urgency involved in it meant that I would read the book or be tormented now.
The book takes place on a coastal island in South Carolina, bringing my passionate longings for the Gulf Coast to a crashing head. It is more than simply being sick of winter, although I feel that too. It steers clear of the usual touristy descriptions of sand and surf, bright clear water and emptiness. Instead it glorifies itself in the muck: the stink of the ocean at low tide, the creatures and plants and bewildering natives who make their place by sticking to these enclaves of open water and submerged secrets like burrs. We are not the spring break dilettantes. We make our lives in marshes; we survive.
My time in Sarasota was some of the most elegant and confused that I have spent anywhere so far upon this earth. I was born there, then taken away a year into my life. When I moved back for college, I never expected to feel the kind of communion with the land that sea turtles feel on their return to their consecrated corners of the sea. I never expected that leaving would be the wrench it was. I knew simply that I would miss it, knew I would miss its sweet downtown and glowing sunsets and unapologetically sleepy sense of life.
It is a town that feels endlessly like waking up. While that time while you are still in bed is technically not producing anything of value, you still have one foot in dreams even as you turn to greet the day. Great trees rise up out of nothing; colorful characters ride by on the air. There is a very great sense of possibility that is borne, on some level, of the fact that there is nothing you could do today that has yet been ruled out.
Boston, on the other hand, feels proscribed. There are things you do here, and things you don’t. I am new here, so it’s possible I’ve misunderestimated this city, pigeonholed it as a kind of status symbol that powerful people pass through on the way to somewhere else and proper people stay in, comfortable in the knowledge that here is a place where you always know what you should do – and so does everyone else.
I knew I would have to leave Sarasota, knew that since I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life or how I was going to get to Italy, I could easily end up staying in town in unpleasant living situations, working a job I didn’t like, and cradled, but possibly smothered, by the place of my birth. I didn’t think I would be able to grow there into the person I needed to become.
What I am learning now is that I might have been able to, but the rate would have been slow, and it would only have happened if I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone was so large, however, that this would have been nearly impossible for me. And what motivation would I have had? Surrounded by friends, a sense of place and belonging, snug in the bosom of birthright and the sea.
I might have come to myself in a different way, a slower way. But it might have been worth it just to understand in my bones that I could do everything I needed to do without always having to remove myself from something that I loved, that productive life is possible even without the constant companionship of a fundamental, aching sense of longing.
The Mermaid Chair is a love story. While reading it I have been lying on the couch listening to Pandora, my favored station: ladyface radio. Ladyface is a snapshot of whatever is in my heart at a given time, and in an effort to keep it as accurate a mirror image as possible, I relentlessly cull and shelve songs, as well as racking my brain to think of what I’m yearning for that’s missing and adding it whenever I can. Right now it is a fabulous mishmash of indie folk, bhangra, klezmer music, old standards (Dean Martin and Sarah Vaughan featuring heavily), assorted Northern European ambient house, sweet electronic blips and bloops, and anything else that strikes my fancy.
The re-imagined tango is a relatively recent addition, and the moody, forceful, and above all restless strummings of Pavlo and Michael Richards are what shot me bolt upright to scrawl this out now. I have been sipping ice water and semi-sweet rosé from stemless wine glasses. Every time one or the other of them rises, full of delayed purpose, to meet my lips at last, I feel in their cool lapping a sadness that is endless, the itching ache of a nameless, faceless lack.
Today I received an email from a man with whom I could have built a future. I would have liked that, very much – so much that I was able to suspend my disbelief that I could care for anyone, that anyone could care for me. I was open and honest and tender to a degree that I would have found terrifying had it happened at any other time and with any other phantom from my past. And it could just be that this man was my penance for the sin of low self-esteem, because his inability to believe in what we could have built began to poison the new well of us, the one for which we had both been dowsing for so long.
Where we had once lain comfortably within each other’s arms, he began at once to cling to and retreat from me. Impassioned pleas for a partner he could trust never to hurt him again blurred into petty sniping at perceived slights and a frat boy’s cavalier, retroactive undervaluing of our intimacy – it made me feel like a whore, or worse. And yet every time I’ve thought his clear lack of sustainable interest – to say nothing of my lack of patience at the way we seem to dance around the edge of things but never dive in – have precluded a relationship, he gets back in touch with me again.
It is one of my dubious talents that I can create complexity where there is none. But as I learn to accept and embrace all my feelings, my fears and anger and desires, happiness and sadness and longing and even all my shame, things have become increasingly simple to me. One thing shines like a beacon: I am less and less able to accept people who are too tightly closed to celebrate themselves. He is someone who has always had the sense that he has a league and I am somehow out of it, and nothing I have been able to do or say has changed that fundamental insecurity that lies between us, pinioning his arms.
I have learned only recently to let my heart exist on my sleeve. It’s healthier out there, no longer caged. It is learning to respire. And one of the things I have learned in tandem is that the way to make it entirely safe and flourishing out there is to remove not only my heart, but myself, from those who might break it with their mysterious flailings. (Trying to remove one but without the other – what a perplexing and impossibly incomplete schism! Finally, finally, we are learning that we go always together.) There is a quality of innocence and wonder that I hold inside, deep, and the rest of me fights with bearlike strength at times to keep it safe. That is my spark, my little pilot light – it has been through too much to go out now on the backs of flawed relationships and the indignity of biting my tongue to keep from saying what I mean.
I am lying here in a winter that is far from the one of my discontent. It will be over soon, and rather than becoming divorced from my own happiness, I am moving closer and closer to being able to own it, to find it, to speak its own name. When I do, I think I’ll understand that large, important parts of it have been with me all this time. Today has been a day filled with lucid, floating dreams of the sweet bays and slanting sunlight of the place that gave me life and knowledge of a vast, unbroken love for me that is waiting to be claimed. I know what I am headed for. How could I pull over now for anything less?
1.18.2009
44
sleepy right now! i am in dc for the inaugural, so this week's writings will be overflowing over at city of notions. stop by and check it out, and happy inauguration!
1.12.2009
parables and prodigies
Last week during my usual International Herald Tribune binge-consumption spree, I came across an article by David Brooks. I find him incredibly refreshing. (This is mostly because the ways in which I disagree with him are so subtle and novel that they end up providing far more nourishment than the saccharine snark of Maureen Dowd, the bookishly nutritious girl-crush I’m nursing on Gail Collins, and often even the toothsome socioeconomic truths Paul Krugman and his brand new Nobel have been laying down of late.) This particular Brooks piece was on the Sidney awards, examining the best of the year’s journalism. I read on.
Writing is a funny thing for me. The extent to which I’ve always known how to do it is matched only by the extent to which I’ve derided it as a viable goal and denied it most of the pleasure it’s brought to my life. Reading is another story; I couldn’t hide my passion for other people’s writing if I tried. I carry a book with me everywhere I go, especially in Boston (nothing is worse than a long and empty commute without at least one source of entertainment). Flânerie be damned; there are times when the most interesting, insightful and fulfilling thing to do in a city is escape from it, if only for a moment on a train.
But somehow, when it comes from making the leap from producer to consumer, admitting in the process the extent to which I roll my thoughts around my lips and brain in polished knots of word-stone, worn smooth by time, I get shy. Writing becomes the equivalent of using an unfamiliar public bathroom: just as unpredictable – and endlessly postponed. I save it up and wait until I’m nearly bursting before pouring all my thoughts out in a hot torrent, then rapidly leaving the scene.
I’d been thinking in vain about how to transform the act of writing, and – more daringly – the act of being a Writer, into something more like the use of that comfortable porcelain throne of my home turf: resplendently mundane, as regular as sleeping (if, happily, marginally more frequent). And I’d been getting nowhere, which is why I was spending my Saturday afternoon 1) comparing writing to taking a piss, 2) reading about other people’s literary triumphs, and 3) avoiding contemplating the conspicuous lack of my own.
In the Brooks piece, I came across a word I didn’t recognize. Even better, it was in Italian! It’s obscenely exciting to me to learn new words; the etymological labyrinths you can spin from one naggingly familiar root are, embarrassingly, some of the most soothing narcotics my battered brain knows how to produce. Neither WordReference nor Dictionary.com seemed to have any clue on my new friend, which is how I found myself gazing intrepidly at the Wikipedia entry for sprezzatura.
I could see almost immediately why WordReference, which attempts to keep its translations to three words or less, had let this one slide; it was as hard to pin down as it was epically satisfying to pronounce. Sprezzatura, as far as I can make out, was an idea that came to favor with aspiring Italian nobles at the beginning of the 1500s, and is essentially the courtly art of faking it till you make it. The art “created a self-fulfilling culture of suspicion,” one byproduct of which was that “the achievement of sprezzatura may require [one] to deny or disparage [one’s own] nature.”
For the exceptionally perceptive observant among you, it may come as no surprise to learn that most of my life has involved faking it till I make it. For the other 99.5%, an explanation.
I don’t feel particularly confident about my skill or prowess in one or another arena. If pressed, it would be difficult for me to tell you, with any certitude, that I was outstanding at anything I’ve tried so far in my life. There are a lot of ways in which my adult existence has felt like a sometimes diverting, if rudderless, exercise in mediocrity.
I was raised to be one of those super-children who were going to take over the world. The reason I was the youngest in my class all through school was because I skipped from kindergarten to first grade when I was five. The plan was that I would then, in the second grade, progress to an obscene ninth grade classroom level (to be fair, this was the educational system of exurban Ohio), presumably graduate high school at age twelve, and pause only to ratchet up degrees in medicine, law, and business from all the best schools before marching into my rightful place on the international, if not the galactic, stage.
The plan was derailed in second grade: my mother got cold feet. It was a poignant first illustration of all the ways in which the first would, indeed, find themselves last. From being the one to move ahead, I became the one who lagged behind: in puberty, in licensed driving, and certainly in all the doors the two in concert can open for the wily adolescent. (I’m still not entirely certain I’ve caught up.)
By the time I limped out of college, having perambulated through three schools and six majors before finally settling on the cryptic Liberal Arts, my fifth year senior status had erased all traces of the future that had been so bright as to cause my five year old self to wear shades. I graduated with little more than a bad taste in my mouth and a toilet paper degree: Liberal Arts (or General Studies, to be strictly precise) is an admission that you have panned the rushing waters of academia and come up with only fool’s gold. I did not apply to graduate school. I did not inherit the earth.
And all this disillusioned hype was in the scholastic field, where many had high hopes for me (only to be dashed in terse progress reports, less a referendum on my capabilities than on my crushing boredom: “Does not live up to full potential.”) In the athletic, the physical, the social, and the emotional realms – let’s just say I was no one’s outside pick to win the Kentucky Derby. In my life, I had a great deal of intensity and equally intensely shifting focus. I had interests, but no shining beacon of clarity and direction that would tell me What To Do With Myself. I still don’t. So – I faked it.
In many cases (remember the illustrious careers in veterinary medicine or visual anthropology? Do you remember?), the passion was there, but the actuality of one choice or another left too much lacking, too many waiting holes unfilled. Then there are the things I am still passionate about, but have never really studied and have no authority on: clothing and industrial and interior design, gourmet cooking, photography, dance, the opposite sex. The only way I ever got up the courage to decide on anything was to channel a competence I didn’t really feel, fake it till I made it, and hope like hell no one noticed while I groped and fumbled (occasionally all too literally) along the treacherous path from fake to made.
I’ve only recently realized that faking it until one makes it is damaging, destabilizing, and overall an entire crock of shit.
The problem with my method is that it ignored the fundamental problem with me: confidence, or lack thereof. That’s not something you can fake – and all these years of trying has left me with absolutely no clue as to how it gets made. It means I don’t know how to let myself be seen as unsure (unless I blanket it in a heavy coating of cerebral doublespeak, which is something I am trying manfully not to do, even as I type this.) (I couldn’t resist the word manfully, though. It’s such a good one! And I figured that any decision so impulsively taken and so emotionally clung to is probably a step in a positive direction in the long run.)
I was thinking idly about love, or maybe lovability, last week (like ya do), staring off into space during another one of those interminable commutes and wondering what it was that made some people the sorts of individuals who you followed with your eyes as they walked by; you couldn’t help yourself. You have to be open, floated through my head. And to do that, you have to let yourself be vulnerable. Record scratch!
Vulnerability is not something I do well. I have a fear that is longstanding (and, for the record, well-founded) of trusting people with my best self. It seems fragile, something that only invites disaster when not protected and wrapped up tight in a highly engineered package of hardness and softness, like a liver or a soft-shelled crab. Diaphanous, defenseless, these are not bodies that thrive on exposure. They are susceptible to rents, tears, the indignity of being devoured whole by ill-clad tourists on Coney Island. What’s a girl to do? The answer has always been, hide.
Recently, on a referral from somewhere or another, I read Waiter Rant. I expected it to be raucously funny, wickedly precise, deliciously familiar from my very brief stint as front of house staff (talk about faking it till you make it! The restaurant business lives on the back of those six words). It was all of that. What I didn’t expect was the subtle poetry or the unexpected grace.
In a lot of ways, the Waiter is someone like me. Our biggest difference is in the fact that I don’t think I’m wasting my life (I haven’t really lived long enough to have gotten there yet) - but I’m not avidly chasing my passion and wrestling it to the floor with both hands, either. And maybe that’s the great failure of me, the reason I’m far more likely to come in second place on Jeopardy! than to try to change the world.
Anyway. The Waiter was in the seminary a couple of lifetimes ago, and as someone with neither biblical training nor interest in acquiring same, I really appreciated the reasonably deft touch he used in weaving parables into the narrative of his vignettes. In speaking of how he’s scared to seize his own dreams, think of himself as a writer, and throw himself into anything that matters if there’s a chance of failure, he invokes the Parable of Talents.
Sure, my critical, over-processed (and possibly under-educated) Liberal Arts brain is urging me to point out that the subsequent lines drawn to underscore the idea of talent-as-currency, talent-as-wealth, talent-as-talent, and talent, ultimately, as potential lost, are a bit belabored. But from a visceral level, it got me right behind in the sternum. Part of believing you’re wasting talent is believing you have talent to waste, and I’m still not sure that that is the case for me, and may not be for a long time, or ever. But another way to look at the same thing is that life is too short to keep from throwing yourself with all your marrow into the things you love enough to fear that they could be taken away.
I have a bit of anxiety over dismantling some of the ironic distance I put up between myself and what I care about, part of which evolved as a survival mechanism at my last and most brutal college (where nothing was more unimportant – to say nothing of gauche - than being earnest). I can’t blame it all on New College, though; that particular iteration of my protective shell was an adaptation of something that was ready for use well before I ever got swindled by that glossy, glossy promotional brochure.
And under the anxiety of being seen to really try is the deeper, more ancient fear of being seen to fail. I don’t know how to shake that fear. Maybe none of us ever do. Perhaps I’ll need to channel the image of those Italian courtiers as a cautionary tale, rocking out in their tights and slimline shoes. The original skinny-jean clad hipsters, they avidly undertook the art of seeming without ever fully grasping one small but essential detail – and it means everything. In avoiding being seen to fail, they were always, constantly and possibly without redemption, committing the biggest failure of all: the failure, in the end, to try.
Writing is a funny thing for me. The extent to which I’ve always known how to do it is matched only by the extent to which I’ve derided it as a viable goal and denied it most of the pleasure it’s brought to my life. Reading is another story; I couldn’t hide my passion for other people’s writing if I tried. I carry a book with me everywhere I go, especially in Boston (nothing is worse than a long and empty commute without at least one source of entertainment). Flânerie be damned; there are times when the most interesting, insightful and fulfilling thing to do in a city is escape from it, if only for a moment on a train.
But somehow, when it comes from making the leap from producer to consumer, admitting in the process the extent to which I roll my thoughts around my lips and brain in polished knots of word-stone, worn smooth by time, I get shy. Writing becomes the equivalent of using an unfamiliar public bathroom: just as unpredictable – and endlessly postponed. I save it up and wait until I’m nearly bursting before pouring all my thoughts out in a hot torrent, then rapidly leaving the scene.
I’d been thinking in vain about how to transform the act of writing, and – more daringly – the act of being a Writer, into something more like the use of that comfortable porcelain throne of my home turf: resplendently mundane, as regular as sleeping (if, happily, marginally more frequent). And I’d been getting nowhere, which is why I was spending my Saturday afternoon 1) comparing writing to taking a piss, 2) reading about other people’s literary triumphs, and 3) avoiding contemplating the conspicuous lack of my own.
In the Brooks piece, I came across a word I didn’t recognize. Even better, it was in Italian! It’s obscenely exciting to me to learn new words; the etymological labyrinths you can spin from one naggingly familiar root are, embarrassingly, some of the most soothing narcotics my battered brain knows how to produce. Neither WordReference nor Dictionary.com seemed to have any clue on my new friend, which is how I found myself gazing intrepidly at the Wikipedia entry for sprezzatura.
I could see almost immediately why WordReference, which attempts to keep its translations to three words or less, had let this one slide; it was as hard to pin down as it was epically satisfying to pronounce. Sprezzatura, as far as I can make out, was an idea that came to favor with aspiring Italian nobles at the beginning of the 1500s, and is essentially the courtly art of faking it till you make it. The art “created a self-fulfilling culture of suspicion,” one byproduct of which was that “the achievement of sprezzatura may require [one] to deny or disparage [one’s own] nature.”
For the exceptionally perceptive observant among you, it may come as no surprise to learn that most of my life has involved faking it till I make it. For the other 99.5%, an explanation.
I don’t feel particularly confident about my skill or prowess in one or another arena. If pressed, it would be difficult for me to tell you, with any certitude, that I was outstanding at anything I’ve tried so far in my life. There are a lot of ways in which my adult existence has felt like a sometimes diverting, if rudderless, exercise in mediocrity.
I was raised to be one of those super-children who were going to take over the world. The reason I was the youngest in my class all through school was because I skipped from kindergarten to first grade when I was five. The plan was that I would then, in the second grade, progress to an obscene ninth grade classroom level (to be fair, this was the educational system of exurban Ohio), presumably graduate high school at age twelve, and pause only to ratchet up degrees in medicine, law, and business from all the best schools before marching into my rightful place on the international, if not the galactic, stage.
The plan was derailed in second grade: my mother got cold feet. It was a poignant first illustration of all the ways in which the first would, indeed, find themselves last. From being the one to move ahead, I became the one who lagged behind: in puberty, in licensed driving, and certainly in all the doors the two in concert can open for the wily adolescent. (I’m still not entirely certain I’ve caught up.)
By the time I limped out of college, having perambulated through three schools and six majors before finally settling on the cryptic Liberal Arts, my fifth year senior status had erased all traces of the future that had been so bright as to cause my five year old self to wear shades. I graduated with little more than a bad taste in my mouth and a toilet paper degree: Liberal Arts (or General Studies, to be strictly precise) is an admission that you have panned the rushing waters of academia and come up with only fool’s gold. I did not apply to graduate school. I did not inherit the earth.
And all this disillusioned hype was in the scholastic field, where many had high hopes for me (only to be dashed in terse progress reports, less a referendum on my capabilities than on my crushing boredom: “Does not live up to full potential.”) In the athletic, the physical, the social, and the emotional realms – let’s just say I was no one’s outside pick to win the Kentucky Derby. In my life, I had a great deal of intensity and equally intensely shifting focus. I had interests, but no shining beacon of clarity and direction that would tell me What To Do With Myself. I still don’t. So – I faked it.
In many cases (remember the illustrious careers in veterinary medicine or visual anthropology? Do you remember?), the passion was there, but the actuality of one choice or another left too much lacking, too many waiting holes unfilled. Then there are the things I am still passionate about, but have never really studied and have no authority on: clothing and industrial and interior design, gourmet cooking, photography, dance, the opposite sex. The only way I ever got up the courage to decide on anything was to channel a competence I didn’t really feel, fake it till I made it, and hope like hell no one noticed while I groped and fumbled (occasionally all too literally) along the treacherous path from fake to made.
I’ve only recently realized that faking it until one makes it is damaging, destabilizing, and overall an entire crock of shit.
The problem with my method is that it ignored the fundamental problem with me: confidence, or lack thereof. That’s not something you can fake – and all these years of trying has left me with absolutely no clue as to how it gets made. It means I don’t know how to let myself be seen as unsure (unless I blanket it in a heavy coating of cerebral doublespeak, which is something I am trying manfully not to do, even as I type this.) (I couldn’t resist the word manfully, though. It’s such a good one! And I figured that any decision so impulsively taken and so emotionally clung to is probably a step in a positive direction in the long run.)
I was thinking idly about love, or maybe lovability, last week (like ya do), staring off into space during another one of those interminable commutes and wondering what it was that made some people the sorts of individuals who you followed with your eyes as they walked by; you couldn’t help yourself. You have to be open, floated through my head. And to do that, you have to let yourself be vulnerable. Record scratch!
Vulnerability is not something I do well. I have a fear that is longstanding (and, for the record, well-founded) of trusting people with my best self. It seems fragile, something that only invites disaster when not protected and wrapped up tight in a highly engineered package of hardness and softness, like a liver or a soft-shelled crab. Diaphanous, defenseless, these are not bodies that thrive on exposure. They are susceptible to rents, tears, the indignity of being devoured whole by ill-clad tourists on Coney Island. What’s a girl to do? The answer has always been, hide.
Recently, on a referral from somewhere or another, I read Waiter Rant. I expected it to be raucously funny, wickedly precise, deliciously familiar from my very brief stint as front of house staff (talk about faking it till you make it! The restaurant business lives on the back of those six words). It was all of that. What I didn’t expect was the subtle poetry or the unexpected grace.
In a lot of ways, the Waiter is someone like me. Our biggest difference is in the fact that I don’t think I’m wasting my life (I haven’t really lived long enough to have gotten there yet) - but I’m not avidly chasing my passion and wrestling it to the floor with both hands, either. And maybe that’s the great failure of me, the reason I’m far more likely to come in second place on Jeopardy! than to try to change the world.
Anyway. The Waiter was in the seminary a couple of lifetimes ago, and as someone with neither biblical training nor interest in acquiring same, I really appreciated the reasonably deft touch he used in weaving parables into the narrative of his vignettes. In speaking of how he’s scared to seize his own dreams, think of himself as a writer, and throw himself into anything that matters if there’s a chance of failure, he invokes the Parable of Talents.
Sure, my critical, over-processed (and possibly under-educated) Liberal Arts brain is urging me to point out that the subsequent lines drawn to underscore the idea of talent-as-currency, talent-as-wealth, talent-as-talent, and talent, ultimately, as potential lost, are a bit belabored. But from a visceral level, it got me right behind in the sternum. Part of believing you’re wasting talent is believing you have talent to waste, and I’m still not sure that that is the case for me, and may not be for a long time, or ever. But another way to look at the same thing is that life is too short to keep from throwing yourself with all your marrow into the things you love enough to fear that they could be taken away.
I have a bit of anxiety over dismantling some of the ironic distance I put up between myself and what I care about, part of which evolved as a survival mechanism at my last and most brutal college (where nothing was more unimportant – to say nothing of gauche - than being earnest). I can’t blame it all on New College, though; that particular iteration of my protective shell was an adaptation of something that was ready for use well before I ever got swindled by that glossy, glossy promotional brochure.
And under the anxiety of being seen to really try is the deeper, more ancient fear of being seen to fail. I don’t know how to shake that fear. Maybe none of us ever do. Perhaps I’ll need to channel the image of those Italian courtiers as a cautionary tale, rocking out in their tights and slimline shoes. The original skinny-jean clad hipsters, they avidly undertook the art of seeming without ever fully grasping one small but essential detail – and it means everything. In avoiding being seen to fail, they were always, constantly and possibly without redemption, committing the biggest failure of all: the failure, in the end, to try.
1.03.2009
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